I’ve encountered AHG’s bug a handful of times. Composition can be messy and not necessarily linear. Sometimes I’ve intended to tie a note but then come up with another voicing, forgotten I had already hit T (Dorico doesn’t give on-screen feedback that a note will be tied to a subsequent note as Finale does, unless you count looking over at the Left Panel, which I never do), and input a note only to find it oddly tied back to some previous instance of that note. If I’ve inadvertently instructed Dorico to do an action with ties that it can’t fulfill, I would expect Dorico to just do nothing as it does with any other nonsensical instruction. If this is intended behavior, then it should be documented so the user can understand it.
Sometimes I find workflows like these speed up note entry. Sometimes it takes two passes to get through a section of music but it’s faster for me:
- Enter ties as separate notes, very quickly. Go back on a second pass, select first note of a tie, hit T. If multiple ties in a row, just hit T again.
- Enter first tied note. Then use alt-right arrow to extend the note. Might take a lot of keypresses if you are set to sixteenth notes in the grid, but not hard to repeat this keystroke a bunch of times.
- Enter tied note as a very long note, then reduce its duration using alt-left arrow.
- I also like second passes for slurs, articulation (sometimes), dynamics, etc.
Dorico is a paradigm shift, or is it a paradigm alt? Or a shift-alt-paradigm that gives you cntl.
That’s a genuinely helpful perspective. Thank you.
Well… no. Do you have any programming experience? I have enough to know that the first step to fixing a bug in software is to be able to reproduce it reliably. I was not trying to break the software… I observed strange behavior and then isolated it… and then reduced it to a procedure to reproduce the bug… and then reported it to the Devs. Much more helpful than saying “ties don’t seem to work right fix them!!!” And, as someone else pointed out, if it is intended then at the very least the docs need to be updated, though I suspect this is a legit bug.
I understand the performer’s mindset. (I’m a decent pianist, at least.) Not sure what you’re driving at here, but this is a very silly statement. I can easily see cases (e.g., 2 sixteenths and then an 8th tied to another 8th… or a half note tied over a barline to another half… I get what you’re doing. That’s useful.) where Dorico’s default behavior is very much desired, but telling me musicians read from right to left is less than not helpful. (Also, for the record, not true. Good musicians read in chunks, skipping ahead and then reviewing back for more complex areas, so it’s not truly left to right… just sayin’.)
Where did I say that musicians read right to left? I said precisely the opposite! I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment, though.
It was you that said:
It’s not the workflow that I take issue with; rather the insinuation that your way must be the correct way.
If I’m copying anything into Dorico, the order that I read things is:
- First note
- Tie
- Second note
To me, it makes perfect sense to type what I see in precisely the order in which I read it. Yes, sure, if I’m sightreading at a piano I’m looking ahead, but if I’m typing one note at a time into the computer then it’s a slightly different workflow; still not one that involves reversing the order of the second and third steps though.
I think maybe we have been saying the same thing all along then. (And I mistyped when I reversed right and left! Sorry!!)
By the way, I don’t think the behaviour regarding the C-D-T-C thing is as inconsistent as you think. T applies retrospectively to whatever pitch you’re about to type.
If you type:
C D T E D C the tie applies to the E. There is no previous E to tie the actual E to.
C T D C the tie applies to the second C. There is a previous C to tie the second C to, so the two Cs are tied.
C D E D C D T E D C the tie applies to the second E. There is a previous E to tie the second E to, so the two Es are tied.
This actually means that undoing accidental ties is very quick - you only have to Cmd/Ctrl-Z once to undo the just-typed note, then hit T (or hit Cmd/Ctrl-Z once more) to toggle off the tie, then reinput the note.
Welcome to the forum! There’s quite a community here, and several of the developers are quite active, so I’m sure you’ll find plenty of resources. The documentation is superb, but you may find google useful to navigate it. There’s also Dan Kreiders excellent beginner’s guide, which I think is particularly helpful for Finale exiles.
I believe the behavior is opposite of how you see it, yet perfectly consistent. When you press T in note input, you apply the tie between the next note you enter, and the last occurrence of the same pitch (IIRC this is opposite of sib and finale). In your first example, you’re actually telling Dorico to tie the E to any preceding E. In the second example, you pressed T before C, which ties it back to the last C. The D is irrelevant in both examples.
Dorico normally considers two tied notes a unit - one long note, of which you cannot even select the individual noteheads in Write mode. This seems to be different for non-successive tied notes, which can be selected individually. These ties seems to ‘belong’ to the first note of each tie chain, and it looks like the untie (U) operation only applies if one of those are selected (in other words, when the tie is highlighted). I see how this can be confusing, and it should probably be mentioned in the documentation, but I don’t think it will bother you much once you know, and I think the visual feedback makes it quite clear.
Looks like Leo beat me to it as usual 
Well, let me add that I’m a huge fanboy of Dorico’s implementation of ties. It’s probably one of the bigger bumps in the road for users coming from other software, but once you master it, it will not only make you save a few keypresses here and there, but make your workflow feel much more fluent. At least, that’s how it feels for me. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from entering ties manually, but as soon as you got the tools under your skin, I think you’ll find Dorico to be completely flexible and predictable. This is not in any way limited to children’s music, but for complex rhythms, you need to use a combination of tools, like “Lengthen duration by grid value” and “Lengthen duration by X note”. There’s a bit of a learning curve to this, but you’ll find it very fast and powerful once you master it. And of course - in some cases, manual entry is the easiest way.
For your example with a sixteenth note tied to a quarter, I would press 4 E Shift+6 (which is a custom key command for Lengthen duration by quarter note - one of my favorites). This is only one less key press than the manual way with 4 E T 6 E, but I find it to be more fluent, and increasingly simpler when inputting chords or longer tie chains.
Anders, Rob beat us both by a country mile 
I’d be no competition for Paul Walmsley; but yes, I have programming experience.
Thanks for sharing your experience AHG. In general, we [manual authors] try to avoid describing “what not to do” in the software, but it can sometimes be hard to draw a line between doing that and including qualifications/tips (especially for Dorico, as many users are coming to it with habits formed in other softwares with different functionality) - and I can see how an example such as yours could make for a genuinely useful additional layer of detail/qualification in parts of the documentation for ties, which I’ve made a note to review.
Now that I’ve re-read Rob’s post, I get it. There is definitely an inherent logic here that is actually quite clear. I think the issue is that not only Dorico works differently from all other notation software I’ve used before (Encore, SCORE, Finale, Sibelius), which is fine of course, but also that the documentation describes it as basically working the same, which it does not. “Start note input. Press T to enter ties. The second note must be the same pitch as the first note. If the second note is a different pitch to the first note, no tie is input.” This isn’t necessarily even true. Whether the note or chord following the T command has a tie or ties to it or not, doesn’t depend at all on the pitch of the note immediately preceding it, only that there is that pitch or pitches at some point preceding it in the flow. Often of course this will be the note immediately preceding it, but that isn’t a requirement at all.
This thread pretty much completely changed my understanding of how ties work in Dorico, so thanks Rob and all!
I haven’t read the documentation of ties recently, but I didn’t figure out my description all by myself. I definitely got it from something written by Steinberg - maybe a post by Daniel, a few years back.
Just wanted to drop an update here. After spending a few days with Dorico, I scored a small work for violin and piano this weekend.
A quick note to the Devs: this program is very well done. I’m sure it will continue to evolve, and I’ll probably have some (hopefully constructive) feedback and observations along the way, but, overall… bravi to all of you who have worked on this. The default handling of many issues is near-magical. As a long-time Finale user, I particularly appreciate your piano pedal markings. (And once I started using your markings I said "holy sh*t. Yes. that’s exactly how it should have always worked why couldn’t Finale do this?)
No need to reply just wanted to drop a word of encouragement after my earlier critique.
That’s a great line rubberfingers!